Personal+Writing

Here is my Autoboigraphical Incident    Over the course of my life I’ve been disappointed many times. The one that comes to mind as the greatest happened about three years ago. You may compare this to a Lego creation that you built and then someone destroyed. However, this analogy comes up short. Take that effect and multiply it by fifty and you get close to what I experienced. Someone destroyed a shack on an island that my brother, our friends, and I had built on an island we discovered. One brisk April morning my brother wanted to show me something he found while canoeing the weekend before. So I got the paddles and life jackets together and walked behind my house to a creek that is located there. The tide was low, but I could tell that it would be high enough in about an hour. So I went back inside and ate breakfast. After about an hour my brother said the tide was high enough. So we walked back to the creek and put the boat in. I was not strong enough to put the canoe in by myself so my brother had to help. I got into the canoe first because I had to be in the front so my brother, Peter, could sit in the back to pilot the canoe. The canoe was touching the creek bed in some places. As long as we were in the middle, the deepest point, we were fine. When we finally got to a strip of land my brother told me to get out, and I said,” This is someone’s property we can’t just go into there backyard”. Peter then explained to me that it was an island that nobody owned. I went ashore and pulled the boat up. The place was just over growing with numerous thorn bushes and ivy growing up every tree. When I looked around I could see that almost the entire place was marshland. Only about a fifth was ground that you could walk on. The island had trash all over it, from plastic bags to beer cans, whatever you put in the creek washed up on this island. Peter asked me what I thought of the place and I said, “We could have a lot of fun here building and hanging out”. He told me his plans about building a shack; he also said not to tell anyone. The day my brother and I found it was joyous, we could do anything we wanted to. Most of all we could call it our own. We came home told our parents, and when we first told them they did not believe us, I do not blame them would you believe your kids if they told you they found a deserted island. Over the next weekends we hauled miscellaneous items, which many people would call trash, but we saw as building materials. Stuff like empty plastic containers, fence posts, leftover shingles, and any kind of scrap wood was our treasure. It was the first time the saying one man’s trash was another man’s treasure ever meant anything to me. So about a month passed and we decided we needed to build something there. We didn’t know what so we built a simple shelter, an 8 by 8 foot, 7 foot high shelter. When we finally finished it gave us a sense of accomplishment. We invited our friends to come see what we had done, they were impressed but they had some ideas for us. So we recruited them to help out. The first thing we did was put walls up on the shelter. The other thing we wanted to do was make a tree house, it turned out to be only a platform. The tree we had picked out was over 20 feet high; we quickly realized that we were going to have to get a tall latter to reach it. So we used my mom’s latter that could get to heights of 25 feet. It took us over an hour to get the ladder to the island requiring two canoes, a journey that usually required 20 minutes of good paddling. Once we got it there we realized it was going to have to stay at the island this ladder was never coming home. The whole construction took about 16 months to complete. The pinnacle of the island came when we spent the night at the island with our friends. I had an immense feeling of accomplishment.

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“Come on, Peter lets go to the island we haven’t been in a month, and it’s a perfect day to go”, I said. “Only if the tide is high”, Peter finally muttered. So I went into my backyard to see if the tide was high and to my pleasing it was high enough to go. So I went back to the house and told Peter that it was high enough so once he finished his breakfast, we got into the canoe and went. It was a good day on the water a beautiful spring day I saw a mother with her ducklings and even a heron. When as we got there I knew something was up, because couldn’t see the shiny ladder that we had put up for the tree platform. My brother assured me that the wind had merely knocked it over and we just had to put it back up. I paddled quicker doubting my brother’s words. When we finally got there I saw the ladder was gone, it disappeared. I searched the area it was in I couldn’t find it. Then to my horror I heard my brother cursing loudly, I ran to where he was, noting it was in the direction of the shack and prepared for the worse. When I arrived I was furious, someone had destroyed our shack and then they burned it. Seeing all that was left ashes I thought to my self who would have done this, who would want to burn something down that someone else has built. We quickly paddled home and called everyone we knew to get to the bottom of it and they all said that they didn’t know who did it. I knew they wouldn’t have done because they built it. I was really upset for about a week after ward because someone had destroyed what Peter, our friends, and I spent working on for over a year. I finally told myself that I would never figure out who did it. I’m kind of glad that I did not find out who it was because I would never be able to be nice that person. This whole event taught me that most things in my life are temporary, and that anything that you make or that has been given to you can be taken away. So enjoy what you have while you have it.